For Which He Plies the Lash

Looks like Dominick Fernow and Kris Lapke's noisy black metal project Ash Pool is seriously in for the long haul with this second album released on Fernow's Hospital Productions label. The music is still raw and furious with a noisy though also quite clean sound but the slight change from the first album is in a greater tendency for songs to break out into a definite, even catchy or folky melody with a jaunty rhythm to match. The main vocals are still ragged and screechy or gargly-deep depending on who is closer to the mike - as with the previous album, a higher screechy vocal and a death metal voice take turns - but occasionally the two Ash Pool men get the urge to sing in clean tones, as if they've got a sea shanty or pub song they'd like to share with us. The result is an album that's a slightly more melodic and deeper-sounding effort with an actual groove in the riffs and rhythms than the debut. The music is tight and disciplined and may well appeal to fans of blackened death metal who don't mind a bit of garage punk influence and raw screaming voices.

The songs are not very different from one another, pretty much going at the same speed throughout the album, always on attack mode and mixing raw primitive BM with structures and rhythms borrowed from death metal perhaps, folk and other styles of music. Only the variation in singing, with some songs having clean vocals and others not, indicates that there's been a change from one track to the next. Only the very last track "On the Rings of Saturn Adam and Even conceive Cain" can be said to stand out due to a passage of space synth and vocal gurgle that could have come off a recent Havohej recording.

The one thing that Ash Pool stays true to and which will keep the duo from being accepted by an alternative mainstream audience, if such people still exist, is the lyrics which dwell on bizarre combinations of exteme sexual psychopathy and violence, crucifixion fantasy and genocide. There is a science fiction veneer of an apocalyptic Big Bang kind with all its underlying suggestions of sexual violence, fiery sacrifice and utter annihilation. Genocide references tend to be of the Nazi-Jewish Shoah / Holocaust kind with titles like "Moon Rose Over Sobibor" - Sobibor was one of the six death camps in Poland where the bulk of Jewish Holocaust victims died. At this time of writing I've only seen the lyrics to the first couple of songs on the album, "Holocaust Temple" and "A Sacrifice Consumed By Fire" and I confess I'm not sure that I'd like to see the rest. I have a hunch though that these themes of sexual perversion, religious pornography and apocalypticism are metaphors that represent something deeply wounded or sick in American and Western society. Fernow is good at writing matter-of-fact yet suggestive lyrics with vivid imagery that are like photographic stills for both Ash Pool and his noise project Prurient but because the subject matter is at once extreme and restricted and Fernow doesn't let on about what he actually thinks of what he writes about - there's a journalistic reporting quality about the lyrics - the words are likely to be appreciated less for their literary qualities and more appreciated or condemned for the wrong reasons or for being what they actually are not (sensational, glorifying violence and brutality).

For all the progress that's been made by the duo since the first album, this second one isn't likely to grow on listeners especially if and when a third album comes out demonstrating even more progress and variety in songwriting and musicianship: they do sound very similar and are dense with so much going on and they go very quickly due to their short length and speed.